# Is there a symbolic math package for octave?

I am using Octave (3.6) on Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS. I want to do some research involving symbolic math. I was thinking of downloading sage (I just found about it today) - but thought I'd better ask in here - at least, I'm already familiar with Octave.

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maxima is pretty good at symbolic math it is available in ubuntu. maple is also a very good option, but it is not free. octave is similar to matlab, and you can do symbolic math in matlab, but it's more complicated, because you have to define the symbolic variables and use them in a certan way. –  Beni Bogosel Apr 6 '12 at 20:57
maxima is what Sage uses to do symbolic math –  Graphth Apr 6 '12 at 21:00
Sage uses many symbolic computation packages: Maxima, Singular, etc. For each functionality, it picks the most suitable algorithm from all the packages. It also allows direct interface to all packages. And it also connects to Octave: reference/sage/interfaces/octave –  user2468 Apr 6 '12 at 21:04
That's the answer to the question then J.D. Do it. –  Graphth Apr 6 '12 at 21:07
I did but OP should wait for more definitive answer from someone who has a first hand experience with octave-symbolic or Sage's octave.eval. –  user2468 Apr 6 '12 at 21:15
MATLAB has a symbolic toolbox where it allows defining symbolic variables via syms and manipulate them etc. It seems that Octave-symbolic is a package that allows Octave to do symbolic computations similar to MATLAB's. Link: http://octave.sourceforge.net/symbolic/
for octave-symbolic installation: sudo apt-get install octave-symbolic –  seyed Dec 12 '13 at 18:25